THE privatised assessment tests which find sick and disabled people ‘fit for work’ are ‘failing claimants and taxpayers’ and must be ‘brought back in-house’, civil servants union PCS said yesterday.

The PCS was responding to the latest National Audit Office (NAO) report released yesterday which shows disability benefit assessments have doubled in cost, costing the taxpayer a whopping £579m last year alone.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘This report, while disappointingly limited in its scope, casts grave doubts on the policy of privatising this very sensitive public service. ‘Claimants need to feel they are being supported, not targeted, and we will continue to press for this work to be brought back in-house.’

The key findings in the report include:

• Schemes still suffering from backlogs, delays and poor quality
• Providers continuing to struggle with hiring and training staff, with knock-on effects on costs and standards
• DWP not learning from its mistakes, with recent performance showing ‘it has not tackled – and may even have exacerbated’ – problems when setting up recent contracts.

An example of one of the tens of thousands of disabled and sick people wrongly assessed as being ‘fit for work’ is the tragic case of Dawn Amos. Dawn Amos was a 67-year-old woman who suffered from severe breathing problems which meant that she could not even walk to the shops.

Her husband Mick said: ‘By the end she could only just get down to the bottom of the garden, about 45-50ft, and that was about it. She had to sit down before she could walk back. She couldn’t even get to the shops on her own. How ill do you have to be?’

19 DEAD, 25 WOUNDED IN VICIOUS KNIFE ATTACK IN JAPAN In the worst mass killing for the country in decades, Satoshi Uematsu went back to his former place of employment, which was a facility for the disabled, and went on a stabbing spree. He had previously warned that he wanted to attack the facility, saying he would be helping the “disabled die in peace.” [Reuters]